A recent preprint paper examines the minimum number of people required to maintain a feasible settlement on Mars while accounting for psychological and behavioral factors, specifically in emergency situations. This study was conducted by a team of data scientists from George Mason University and holds the potential to help researchers better understand the appropriate conditions …
I saw a documentary about this - you actually only need one person as long as they like eating potatoes
“In the end, they determined that a minimum colony population of 22 agents was ideal to maintain a feasible Mars mining colony over the long-term.”
I always confused “The Thing” with the character from Fantastic Four. And never understood why people were afraid of a rock person who shouts “It’s clobbering time!”
Does that include the mad eco terrorist/saviour stow away who kick starts terra forming Mars then founds his own colony on the South Pole?
Yes, but that’s four different people. One eco-terrorist, one stowaway, one terraforming fanatic, and one founder of a weird sex cult.
Presumably some of them would have to be female, making a Mars colony settled entirely by muskies unviable.
You want a colony consisting only of fanatics? Then 22 may be the number. It’s going to be 22 very different types, and every one of them has to decide every day that this is going to last long…
If you want a colony consisting of normal people that lasts for long, then you need thousands. Humans need a lot diversity before they can be normal and stay healthy.
Considering humanity was knocked down to about 1200 people about 800,000 years ago and we survived without any technology to speak of, let alone genetic testing that would help determine maximum diversity, I’d say you might be surprised.
That assumes that everyone will be willing to have children with just about anyone, regardless of their personal opinion of them, and regardless of whether or not they even want children to begin with. You can’t selectively breed humans without massive human rights violations.
I recall a similar study years ago. They concluded 32 was minimal viable, assuming a strict breeding regiment over several generations, with 8 men and 24 women. They also concluded about 500 would be the smallest practical size, given people aren’t robots and losing even a couple people before leaving the breeding pool would be very bad. That was a fundamentally different study though, looking at long term, self sufficiency. This one seems more focused on an Antarctica like outpost that would be able to cycle people in and out, and not establishing a full on colony.
Antarctica like outpost that would be able to cycle people in and out, and not establishing a full on colony.
Thank you for pointing out this detail of possibly returning!
We might be able to travel to Mars in a few years. But it will take many more years before anybody can travel back from there.
Mars has a gravity similar to earth. In order to leave the planet we need to launch rockets from there, about the same size as we launch from earth. And therefore we need to build lots of stuff there and operate it properly.
The first ‘colonists’ will have to go with the expectation of never returning.
I don’t think Mars colonies are realistic, but not for this reason. Mars has about one third the gravity of earth, and a much thinner atmosphere, so you can return on a significantly smaller rocket than you launched with. It’s true that manufacturing a space rocket of any size would require basically an entire civilization, but there’s no reason you couldn’t bring the return vehicle with you, and only require manufacturing fuel or propellant on site.
The top answer to this stackexchange post goes into a lot more detail on the practicalities https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2820/how-big-would-a-manned-ascent-stage-for-mars-need-to-be
